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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28332090">we could lay with the leaves making sweet memories</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thespottedowl/pseuds/thespottedowl'>thespottedowl</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>BBS drabbles [12]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Banana Bus Squad</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Can be read platonically or romantically - Freeform, Dragons, Fantasy elements, Fauns &amp; Satyrs, Gen, Hunting, I did a shitty job of filling this prompt, I may come back to this at some point, I'm sorry demi I love you to bits, Inspired by..., Isolation, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, Secret Santa, Sort of? - Freeform</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:22:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,691</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28332090</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thespottedowl/pseuds/thespottedowl</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>secret santa for the krii7y haven server! happy holidays, demi, I hope you're having good ones &lt;3</p><p>Jaren clambers down the gorge, lets Octavia off of her jesses to flutter around his head for a moment before she dives back under his shirt, giving her little chirruping call of alarm.</p><p>Jaren ignores her, striding into the camp. The man stands from where he was bent over the fire, regarding Jaren coolly with lidded eyes. “Hello,” Jaren says, and thrusts a hand out.</p><p>There’s a second pause, when Jaren thinks maybe the man will brush him off entirely. He doesn’t, warm hand sitting confidently in Jaren’s. “Would you like to make a willow whistle with me?” he asks, and his voice is rough and interesting.</p><p>Maybe it’s been a while since Jaren spoke to a human, but he doesn’t remember that being in the script at all. His grip falters. “I- What?”</p><p>[title from animal crossing by Shawn Wasabi]</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>John | KryozGaming/SMii7Y, John | Kryozgaming &amp; SMii7Y</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>BBS drabbles [12]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/748089</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Krii7y Haven Writing</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>we could lay with the leaves making sweet memories</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>sddjvfgjdfgh DEMI baby. sweetheart. king of my heart. I don't think this is what u wanted at all but uh. here's smitty doing wilderness survival and also having a few short convos w john bc What Is A Human? also satyrs are only briefly involved and I would be happy to revisit this bc I know that was your original request also ily don't forget it</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>John’s eyes flit sharply over his face, then scan sideways, examining the sparsely decorated interior of the small hut. The walls are the solid, dead wood that Jaren had carved the house out of, sturdy enough to survive the year and not much more, and the sound of the wind howling is obvious and bites through them both. Jaren’s teeth are chattering despite the thick woolen blanket wrapped around him, and John stands, approaching him with the twin that had been wrapped around his shoulders.</p><p> </p><p>“Won’t you be cold?” Jaren asks, and his tongue feels thick and slow with cold but he’s shivering too much to care.</p><p> </p><p>“No.” John’s in light pants and a sweater, and admittedly a winter coat, but he seems entirely unaffected. Jaren feels a bit silly, but John rolls his eyes and settles the fabric around Jaren and the relief of the warmth is immediate.</p><p> </p><p>They can’t make a fire, not with the house boarded up and snow-sturdy as it is, the ventilation hole covered with a slanted piece of wood that Jaren had chopped up to make the snow roll off. The fire had stayed almost ever present the past few months of cold, but the snow outside had quickly become a blizzard. John had shown up not long after, heavy boots leaving imprints in the snow and blankets wrapped around his back like a cape.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren had worried about being able to support the both of them if the snow kept up. His food stores weren’t meager, but they weren’t meant for two people, and he didn’t know whether he would be able to keep up his routine of trapping in the snow.</p><p> </p><p>Now he’s having trouble being anything except grateful. The wind is still howling furiously outside, flooding the room with chilly air, and there’s still a concern tickling around in the back of his head about whether he’ll even be able to leave his house come morning, but at least he’s a little less concerned about losing any toes to frostbite.</p><p> </p><p>John is still standing in the center of the small room, staring at the door. His face twitches with an unknown emotion.</p><p> </p><p>“Something’s out there.”</p><p> </p><p>His face is deadly serious, and his eyes track something past the door, through the wall.</p><p> </p><p>“What?” Jaren asks, more out of confusion than anything else. He doesn’t know what other animals would be out in weather as bad as this, and even if there was something out there, how would John be able to hear it over the wind gusting aggressively around the tree?</p><p> </p><p>John doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t move from the middle of the room either, holding his hands out from his sides loosely, as if preparing to take flight.</p><p> </p><p>The snow continues for two days, and the pair are about bored to death by the time morning dawns on the third day. Their lamp has almost burned down, too, the deer fat candle evaporated to nothing. Jaren forces the door open, and while he’s relieved it opens at all, it mostly packs the snow behind it into one solid mass, and then Jaren’s view is all snow again.</p><p> </p><p>John laughs at him when he crawls clumsily up through the snow to poke his head out the top.</p><p> </p><p>Everything is white, clean, shining, and beautiful, and the sky seemed bluer than Jaren had ever seen it, shining between the dead branches of the forest cover. The hemlock grove is laced with snow, the meadow smooth and white, and the gorge sparkles with ice. It’s so beautiful and peaceful that Jaren chuckles contentedly, though it becomes a laugh when he hears John’s impatient noise behind him.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren’s first snowstorm is over, and though the worry of foraging hadn’t left him, Jaren is filled with a terrible sense of relief. He’d survived, and besides the somewhat unbearable boredom, it hadn’t been so awful. Though he’d been preparing for winter through all the summer and fall, he’d still thought about turning tail when the first cold front had moved through, the third day of December.</p><p> </p><p>He’d survived the first blizzard. He could make it through the year.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>The old roads up to the farm are grown up, mostly gone among the trees, but Jaren found the stream at the base of the mountain, the bridge that crossed it, and up a mile and a half. There, caterpillaring around boulders, roller-coastering up ravines and down hills, is the mound of rocks that had once been his great-grandfather’s boundary fence.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren sits on the old stones a long time, looking up the mountain. It seems impossible to be here; Jaren considers for a long time that perhaps it is another one of those rainy Sunday afternoons, and his father is trying to keep him and all his siblings quiet by telling them about Great-grandfather’s farm, and he’s telling it so real that Jaren could see it.</p><p> </p><p>No, he thinks. When Dad tells us stories about Great-grandpa, I’m never this hungry.</p><p> </p><p>The first night, Jaren stuffs himself on a catfish, caught in the stream that runs through the property, and doesn’t explore much beyond. He’s high on the feeling of independence, the fire roaring with life in front of him and the smell of cooked fish lingering pleasantly in the air.</p><p> </p><p>The next day, walking up the property, Jaren comes upon what he was sure was the old foundation of the house. His father was right. It’s ruins — a few stones in a square, a slight depression for the basement, and trees growing right up through what had once been the living room. Jaren wanders slowly through to see what’s left of the old home.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren continues through the property, then; if no one else owns it, and it used the belong to his family, then it may as well be his, right? It’s definitely not correct, but he would like to think so. He discovers some interesting things about his property, like the apple and hickory trees that will drop fruit in the fall, and a marsh with cattails and arrow-leaf that would be good to eat.</p><p> </p><p>Around noon, Jaren steps into a meadow. At the top of the meadow is a fringe of white birch. There are maples and oaks to the west, and a hemlock forest to the right that pulls him right across the sweet grasses into it.</p><p> </p><p>Never, never had Jaren seen trees like this. They’re giants, old, old giants, so large they must have been planted before the world began.</p><p> </p><p>Taking a cautious step into the forest, Jaren was once again baffled by the size of the trees. Boulders taller than him, covered in ferns and moss and lichen, stand haughtily on the forest floor, but even they look like pebbles underneath the massive hemlocks. Jaren’s steps are silent as he pads between them, muffled by the dense, damp layer of needles of the forest floor.</p><p> </p><p>Circling around one of the largest trees, a plan springs fully formed as Athena herself into Jaren’s head. On the western side of the tree, between two of the flanges that spread out into roots, is a cavity. The heart of the tree is rotting away, and Jaren scrapes at it with his hands excitedly. Old, rotten, insect-ridden dust crumbles out, and Jaren digs on, using his ax from time to time as his delight grows.</p><p> </p><p>With much of the old rot carved away, Jaren can crawl into the tree and sit cross-legged, feeling cozy as a turtle in its shell. He’s onto the hard part now, chopping away at the hard good wood until he’s exhausted, and it’s another few days of scrounging for food and wondering whether he could possibly carve the tree out all the way when the idea comes to him.</p><p> </p><p>He’s stamping out the remains of a cooking fire after another fish meal, lamenting the time that it took to catch and cook a meal when he was so behind on carving out the tree trunk. His foot stops in the air.</p><p> </p><p>The Native Americans had made dugout canoes with fire, hadn’t they?</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>The water in the stream is like ice, even in the warm May air.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren’s stomach is cramping terribly, and the fish in the stream aren’t biting. It seems only to make Jaren hungrier as he watches their hulking bodies shift in the clear water. A stream is supposed to be full of food. Jaren stares into the water listlessly.</p><p> </p><p>Mussel tracks stare back.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren’s hair drips with water as he sits by the fire. He’s wrapped the mussels in leaves, almost a full peck of them, and sort of steamed them over the fire. (He wasn’t even sure if that would work, but it seems to. They don’t taste as good as clams.)</p><p> </p><p>Dinner is a salad, if only because it’s easy to make. He collects the bulbs from dogtooth violets, that taste a little like lima beans raw, and the green and the roots of the dandelions that bloom in the meadow. He gets lucky, too, maybe, or maybe is rewarded for being observant, because a crow flies through the aspen grove as he’s walking back to the hemlocks, obviously trying to be sneaky, and then Jaren has boiled crow’s eggs with his salad.</p><p> </p><p>He’s putting out the fire, stamping on the lit embers, when it occurs to him that he should really be living near water. He’d need it for cooking and drinking and comfort, and so he wouldn’t have to trek through feet of snow to get it in the winter, and if ever a fire got out of control. Jaren casts a dejected look at the great hemlock and steels himself to desert it when something else pops unbidden into his mind, which must have come out of a book: “Hemlocks usually grow around mountain streams and springs”.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren spins on his heel. There’s nothing but boulders on the forest floor around him, but the air is damp. He darts through the rocks, peering and looking and sniffing and ducking into pockets and dales. No water. He’s coming back to the tree, circling wide, and almost falls into it. Two sentinel boulders, dripping wet, are decorated with flowers, ferns, moss, weeds – everything that loved water – guarding a bathtub-sized mountain spring. Jaren flops on his stomach and pushes his face into the water to drink.</p><p> </p><p>Oar bugs skitter across the water’s surface at the disruption, rowing away in displeasure. Beetles skitter like bullets across the glassy surface, or carry silver bubbles of air with them to the bottom. A crayfish loiters at the edge of a rock, then ducks abruptly under a rock just as Jaren opens his eyes.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren jumps up, overturning rocks immediately, and grinned at the crayfish skittering away from the sudden light. He hesitates for only a moment before grabbing them, because they pinch, and it hurts, but he knows how much more the twisting pain of hunger hurts. Wrapping the crayfish in leaves and filling his pockets, Jaren heads back to the tree.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Jaren’s father used to shoot the dragons that swirled above their house. He said they attacked the chickens, and Jaren knew that was bullshit because the only thing that ever killed their chickens was Mr. Wine’s old three-legged dog. Jaren’s father wouldn’t be deterred.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren is downstream further than usual one day, hoping to catch trout where the stream ran thick into a river, and spots the big ole thing swinging down the valley on long, pointed wings. He was struck immediately by the ease and swiftness of its flight.</p><p> </p><p>Late in the evening, when the sun is almost down, Jaren makes a fire on a flat boulder in the stream and cooks the trout, watching the sky. He waits patiently and is rewarded after only an hour. A slender speck comes from the valley, gliding over the stream, and it’s still far away when it folds its wings and bombs the earth. Jaren watches as it arises, big and clumsy with the food in its talons and wings back towards the valley.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren walks into the forest as the sun sets and makes a lean-to near the cliffs where he thinks the creatures disappeared to. They nest on cliffs oftentimes, and Jaren settles on this site, plan solidifying in his head.</p><p> </p><p>Early in the morning, he digs up tuber roots for breakfast and settles in behind a willow to wait.</p><p> </p><p>The dragons come in from behind him, circling the stream. They must have been out hunting before dawn, and Jaren’s heart thrums with excitement. They’re feeding young, and Jaren is near the nest.</p><p> </p><p>He watches one of them swing in to the cliff and disappear. A few minutes later it wings out empty-footed. Jaren marks the spot mentally.</p><p> </p><p>After splashing across the stream in the shallows, he stands at the bottom of the cliff and wonders how on earth he’s going to climb the sheer wall, but he wants a dragon so badly that he digs in with my toes and hands and starts up.</p><p> </p><p>The first part is easy, not too steep. When he thinks he’s stuck, he finds a little ledge and shinnies up to it. He’s up high, and when he looks down, the stream spins.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren decides not to look down anymore.</p><p> </p><p>He edges up to another ledge and lays down on it to catch his breath. He’s shaking from exertion and he’s tired. Panting, Jaren looks up to see how much higher he has to go when his hand touches something moist.</p><p> </p><p>He pulls it back to see that it’s white — droppings. Then he sees them. Almost where his hand had been sat three pale green dragons. Their wide-open mouths give them a startled look.</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, hello, hello,” Jaren says, just as startled. “You are cute, huh?”</p><p> </p><p>When he speaks, all three blink at once. All three heads turn and follow his hand as he swings it up and toward them. All three watch my hand with opened mouths. They’re marvelous. Jaren chuckles, but he’s just far enough away that he can’t reach them.</p><p> </p><p>He worms forward and wham! — something hits his shoulder. It smarts, and Jaren turns his head to see the big female winging out, banking, and starting back for another strike.</p><p> </p><p>Now he’s properly scared, sure she would cut him wide open. With the sudden burst of nerves, Jaren stands up, steps forward, and picks up the biggest of the nestlings. He tucks her in his sweater and leans against the cliff, facing the bulletlike dive of the falcon. Heart pounding in his chest, he throws out his foot as she strikes, and the sole of his tennis shoe takes the blow.</p><p> </p><p>The female is now gathering speed for another attack, and speed often means 50 to 60 miles an hour. Jaren could see himself battered and torn, lying in the valley below, and he immediately scrambles to get off the cliff face with his new dragon before he actually ended up dead at the foot of the mountain.</p><p> </p><p>He jumps to the ledge below, finds it’s really quite wide, slides on the seat of my pants to the next ledge, and stops. The mother apparently can’t count; she doesn’t know Jaren had taken a youngster, for she checked her nest, saw the open mouths, and then she forgot him.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren scrambles down to the riverbed, being very careful not to hurt the warm body curled against his own. Octavia, as he had decided to call her during the blur of the sprint, doesn’t think quite so gently of Jaren, curling her talons into his skin to brace herself during the bumpy ride.</p><p> </p><p>He stumbles to the stream, places the tiny dragon into a nest of buttercups, and drops beside her. He’s asleep almost immediately.</p><p> </p><p>When he wakes, his eyes open to two gray eyes, massive in a shimmering green stroobly head. Small pinfeather scales sprouted from her delicate skin, like arrows from a quiver. The big green beak curled down in a snarl and up in a smile.</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, Octave,” he says, grinning. “You are a raving beauty.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Something is not right at the tree house. Jaren can tell before even setting foot in the meadow.</p><p> </p><p>He can’t put his finger on exactly what’s wrong, but after spending so long with the birds and animals, human movement is like the difference between a pistol and a cannon.</p><p> </p><p>It doesn’t occur to him that perhaps someone was making themselves intentionally obvious, only the concern that someone has come to take him home, so Jaren worms his way away from the stand of trees, checking his traps as he walks toward the gorge. Octavia slithers across his shoulders, huffing lightly as he loosens the wire around a caught rabbit.</p><p> </p><p>One of the fire planes must have spotted the smoke from his fire, Jaren tells himself. He settles in at the gorge, making a quick lean-to for himself. He skins the rabbit slowly, methodically, tossing the organs he wouldn’t eat to Octavia. She gulps them up, and Jaren grins, pleased at the hard-to-explain feeling that comes with watching marvelous life pump through a strange little body.</p><p> </p><p>The food seems to drag her tiny body down, and she curls into a ball under the lean-to, head under a wing to sleep. Jaren stands, gives in to the desire to see if the man is gone from his house.</p><p> </p><p>The sun is slanting the right direction now, and Jaren can see him almost perfectly. He looks very average, and Jaren decides he quite likes that – the man doesn’t look menacing one bit, not like the kind of person to send someone back to the city. He’s also not wearing a fire warden uniform, nor a uniform of any kind, and Jaren lets himself relax a little.</p><p> </p><p>He sleeps by the gorge, with Octavia’s warm little body curled up on his back, and decides that if the man is still there in the morning, he’ll introduce himself.</p><p> </p><p>He is. Jaren clambers down the gorge, lets Octavia off of her jesses to flutter around his head for a moment before she dives back under his shirt, giving her little chirruping call of alarm.</p><p> </p><p>Jaren ignores her, striding into the camp. The man stands from where he was bent over the fire, regarding Jaren coolly with lidded eyes. “Hello,” Jaren says, and thrusts a hand out.</p><p> </p><p>There’s a second pause, when Jaren thinks maybe the man will brush him off entirely. He doesn’t, warm hand sitting confidently in Jaren’s. “Would you like to make a willow whistle with me?” he asks, and his voice is rough and interesting.</p><p> </p><p>Maybe it’s been a while since Jaren spoke to a human, but he doesn’t remember that being in the script at all. His grip falters. “I- What?”</p><p> </p><p>“Willow whistle. You. Yes?” He brandishes something in Jaren’s direction, and Octavia gives a sharp frightened huff against his skin, but it seems to be a fat twig about eight inches long.</p><p> </p><p>“Sure?” It’s more a question than anything, but the man gives him a smile.</p><p> </p><p>“Great. I’m John, by the way.”</p><p> </p><p>Jaren ends up trailing John down to the stream to cut a new piece of wood and slip the back, and he feels rather like a lost puppy considering he built the entire campsite that they sit in. John whittles a mouthpiece at one end, cuts a hole underneath it, and uses the wood to slide up and down like a trombone.</p><p> </p><p>He offers the end to Jaren, who is more baffled than anything, and doesn’t think he’s discovered any information about why the man is sitting in his campsite anyway, but he takes the whistle automatically.</p><p> </p><p>John stands, brushes off the seat of his pants. “I’ll be seeing you around then?” he asks, and before Jaren can ask any other questions, he disappears into the darkness almost noiselessly.</p><p> </p><p>Octavia’s tail curls around his neck as she settles back in on his shoulder. “Huh,” he says, and she huffs her agreement.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Two days after the blizzard, when John has disappeared into the snow, he returns, clutching a small bag in one hand, and not wearing any of these pants. Octavia doesn’t move from where she’s perched on Jaren’s shoulder, only snorts a warning at John. Jaren processes all three of these things at the same time.</p><p> </p><p>“Hi,” he says blankly. “Nice, uh. Fur?”</p><p> </p><p>John chuckles at him. “Hi. Happy Valentine’s Day, I brought you peppermint.”</p><p> </p><p>It takes a second for those words to hit, too, because Jaren’s still busy processing the fact that one of the few humans he’s had contact with isn’t actually human at all. His legs are that of a goat, dark curly fur dusted with the snow he’d tramped through to get to Jaren’s.</p><p> </p><p>On the other hand, he hasn’t had anything with sugar since he’d left his dad’s house last spring. “Sticks or mints?”</p><p> </p><p>“If it’s a peppermint, isn’t it a mint no matter what shape it’s in?” John smirks at him. “Also, sticks.”</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, good,” Jaren says, and accepts one gratefully to suck on as they tramp along under Octavia. She hunts gracefully, a green blur over the boys’ heads, and the sparrow and rabbit that she drops to Jaren will keep them nicely until he can set more traps. He lets her keep the pheasant that she snags on the way back to the snowed-in house, and jesses her as she tears at the tiny bones.</p><p> </p><p>John makes himself comfortable on Jaren’s bed, watching him putter around, stoke the small fire, set the meats to smoking.</p><p> </p><p>“A warbler came yesterday,” he mentions nonchalantly, and Jaren’s heart squeezes. He had almost managed to distract himself with mundanities – trying to catch a monstrous snapping turtle, figuring out how to store deer meat and turn the skin into clothing – and had intentionally forgotten how close spring really is, just how short a time there is before he leaves. It feels like forever and no time at all, all at once.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes,” Jaren says, and John’s cloven hooves clack on the wooden floor behind him. “Yes.”</p>
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